AER. 3.1 AER is an independent statutory authority established under Part IIIAA of the Competition and Consumer Act 2010 (Cth) (the CCA). The AER has an independent board and shares staff, resources and facilities with the ACCC. The ACCC and AER share many common objectives, both working to protect, strengthen and supplement competitive market processes.
AER. It is possible to find negative values of αaer. They are most likely due to statistical uncertainties in the fit procedure, or can be due to systematic effects. As the laser is far from the FD site, the brightest measured laser light profile, after accounting for relative calibrations of the FD and the laser, occurs during a clear reference night. However, there are uncertainties (see section 4.2.3) in the calibrations that track the FD PMT gains and the CLF laser energy relative to the reference period. Therefore, in some cases it is possible that parts of a laser light profile recorded during a period of interest can slightly exceed the corresponding profile recorded during a reference period. Typically, these artifacts occur during relatively clear conditions when the aerosol concentration is low. The effect could also happen if a localized scattering region, for example a small cloud that was optically too thin to be tagged as a cloud, remained over the laser and scattered more light out of the beam. However, since negative values of αaer are unphysical, they are set to zero. Since the integrated αaer values are renormalized to the measured τ meas profile, this procedure does not bias the aerosol profile towards larger values. The remaining values of αaer are numerically integrated to get the fit optical depth τ fit . The final values for αaer and τ fit can be used for corrections in light P04009 aer transmission during air shower reconstruction. aer In figure 9, examples of laser and τaer profiles are displayed from an average night and from a cloudy night when the laser pulse passed through a cloud. In the left panels the black traces represent the hourly profiles and the red traces represent the reference clear nights. In the right panels τ meas and τ fit measurements as a function of height are shown. The black curve is τ meas aer aer aer aer and τ fit is overlaid in red. The upper and lower traces correspond to the uncertainties. In the cloudy night, a large amount of light is scattered by a cloud starting from a height of approximately 7000 m. In the bottom right panel, the minimum height at which a cloud was detected is indicated by a vertical blue line.
